Gina Yu in Uganda in 2017
A University of Michigan medical student is taking a year off for training in an unusual sub-specialty: journalism.
M4 Gina Yu is the 2019 recipient of Stanford’s unique Global Health Media Fellowship, which teaches physicians-in-training to leverage the media in order to advocate and inform on global health issues. She will spend the next year in California taking master’s-level journalism courses, interning at CNN, and developing a capstone field project. The fellowship began this month.
“I’ve always been aware that physicians have a huge responsibility to share our knowledge with the general public,” Yu said. “It’s important to advocate for people globally who need help or access but who might not be able to effectively share their own stories.”
Stanford selects one fellow each year for the program. Yu, who hails from Saline, just south of Ann Arbor, is the first UMMS student to be selected. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she wrote a regular opinion column on medical ethics for the student-run Harvard Crimson. As a second-year medical student at UMMS, Yu spent much of the summer of 2017 in Uganda helping with a research project to explore mental health among those infected with HIV.
“This particular fellowship checked all of the boxes for me,” she said. “I know I want to build some sort of global health aspect into my career and I’ve always been interested in medical journalism — writing about medicine in a way that is most approachable.”
Read more about Yu's journalism fellowship on the Global REACH website.